I have dreamt of being an anthropologist since my sophomore year of college. But I haven’t usually literally dreamt of being an anthropologist…

I haven’t been writing because there’s nothing to write. How about a pretty picture, instead?

Sergei Elnitsky, a comrade of mine from #Poetry, on Undernet, has posted his sublimely clever translations of Russian actor Vladimir Vysotsky’s (Влади́мир Высо́цкий) songs. The translations are accompanied by RealAudio copies of the original Russian songs, which make for equally amusing listening. (Vysotsky was an actor, and his delivery is comically spot-on, even when you [...]

‘It was to be drummed into the minds of the people that, for the first time, no free African-American was to dare to lift his or her hand against a “Christian, not being a negro, mulatto or Indian” (3:459); that African-American freeholders were no longer to be allowed to vote (4:133-34); that the provisions of a previous enactment (3:87 [1691]) was being reinforced against the mating of English and Negroes as producing “abominable mixture” and “spurious issue” (3:453-4); that, as provided in the 1723 law for preventing freedom plots by African-American bond-laborers, “any white person… found in company with any [illegally congregated] slaves” was to be fined (along with free African-Americans or Indians so offending) with a fine of fifteen shillings, or to “receive, on his, her, or their bare backs, for every such offense, twenty lashes well laid on.” (4:129)’

Crap science is eating your brain; I have needs, too.

Police investigate ‘backlash’ attacks in the UK.
I might also add that Hammurabi’s eye-for-an-eye came hand-in-hand with innocent-until-proven-guilty.
A couple of recent interesting notes from the Arab and Muslim blogging world:

I really don’t want to trivialise the deaths and the pain in London — a human life is a human life and we all matter. But as long as we keep on thinking of this violence as something they do to us, this is never going to end. To remember the Iraqi innocents who have [...]

Well… First publication since my high school graduation speech. The current issue of LiP Magazine has an interview I conducted with Michael Muhammad Knight — American Muslim/agnostic iconoclast, author of The Taqwacores, and frequent contributor to Muslim WakeUp! It ain’t brilliant stuff (my fault, not Mike’s), and there are rumours that I might be dating [...]

I spent this past weekend with Erin and a bunch of radical twenty-somethings up in Anderson Valley — one of the NorCal enclaves where the hippies settled in the diaspora following the Summer of Love. Erin’s former housemate Jade grew up in the woods on a forty-acre plot that her dad purchased back in the [...]